Many thanks to Adam Day, VP of Business Development at HRAnswerlink for his participation on describing how his firm was able to leverage LongJump’s on-premise PaaS to drive rapid deployment of their new SaaS offerings.

This follows past eSeminars including:

• Cloud Computing, SaaS and Its Impact on Channel Solution Providers

• New Strategies For Building Business Applications In 2010

If you’d like to view this eSeminar and any in the past that cover SaaS, PaaS and Cloud Computing, you can click here for recorded archives.

Technorati Tags: application development, cloud computing, enterprise, enterprise applications, isv, IT department, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas, software-as-a-service

Led by John Rymer, Forrester’s research team including Randy Heffner, Jeffrey S. Hammond, James Staten, and Wallis Yu, provided an extensive report entitled “Platform-As-A-Service Is Here: How To Sift Through The Options” on several PaaS vendors, including LongJump. The report discusses the rewards and risks of PaaS for application development and includes products up and down the PaaS stack, and is one of the most extensive reports on the topic.

The basic reward of PaaS is that it allows IT groups to defray capital costs and some operations costs (configuration, management, reliability, and scalability) to a vendor. PaaS shares these potential advantages with other forms of “cloud computing.” If the economics work out, application development groups should be able to use these cost savings to improve their responsiveness to the business’ needs for new and changed applications.

The Forrester report also deep dives into how enterprises can start planning for PaaS-based initiatives with a pragmatic approach to their long tail IT applications, including on-premise deployment as offered by LongJump’s new platform configuration.

Forrester recommended that application development managers begin to experiment with PaaS to determine its potential future value. Forrester is convinced that today’s PaaS market contains at least the seeds of the next generation of application platforms, if not one or more of the companies that will drive the category. We recommended considering how PaaS can help deal with current business needs and listed important factors to consider when working to create a prudent initial approach to PaaS.

The complete report is available on Forrester’s website here. If you subscribe to their research, you can get the report for free.

Technorati Tags: application development, Application Strategy & Selection, Architecture & Technology Strategy, Computer Architectures, Data Management, Development Tools, forrester, Information & Knowledge Management, IT department, IT Infrastructure & Operations, IT Services, john rymer, Outsourcing, PaaS, Packaged Applications

The gang at CS Techcast, a podcast by Consortio Services, talked with the CEO of LongJump, Pankaj Malviya, about Platform as a Service to get the scoop on cloud computing trends for business. They discuss the adoption of cloud computing platforms within corporate IT teams, and how PaaS provide a point in evolution for developers to create enterprise applications in the cloud. Pankaj also discusses how LongJump is one of many platform tiers within cloud computing. The interview also examines how PaaS changes IT’s perspective to evaluate their focus in their organizations in regards to cost savings, security, and capabilities inherent in the platform they build on.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, IT department, PaaS

SaaS solutions have been around for going on 10 years now and the time is right to see broader and deeper adoption of this approach to application development and utilization. Lower risk processes like sales, marketing and HR have provided the first set of users to benefit from shorter implementation times, easier to use applications and functionality that is perpetually kept up to date. Now that enterprises are faced with doing even more with even less, SaaS should be considered as a replacement more mission-critical internal business processes as well as customer facing applications. By all means grieve, but know that SaaS has been waiting patiently for you since the day you first met. She’s grown as platform and so have your needs.

The traditional technology adoption cycle has just received a jarring inflection point kick in the pants. Typically new technologies move through a predictable path from early adopters to market laggards the same way almost every other commodity introduced into the marketplace. It is a challenging cycle that many technologies fail to overcome (does anyone remember bubble memory and hand-held scanners?) but fairly predictable none the less. According to Geoffrey Moore in his book, Crossing the Chasm, each stage along the way requires certain strategies and tactics that increase the likelihood of success.

Assessing the Grieving Process

The last few months have dramatically changed the landscape globally and everyone will be looking at everything they do from a different perspective. We are just now getting out of the denial phase of dealing with this crisis and heading smack into anger over how this all happened and happened so quickly. If this path is continued, bargaining will ensue and that means evaluating what can be done differently to survive in the new economic reality. From an organizational perspective that means looking at every cost associated with everything to see if it can be done away with or done more cheaply in another way (saas starts looking better for a broader role in the business.)

Without this shock to the system the status quo would have been maintained because there would not have been a compelling reason to change what was already in place. Companies do not experience depression, the next phase of coping with a tragic event, even though the people that make up an organization can and often do experience it quite profoundly.

So that leaves acceptance of the fact that a bad thing has happened and the only choice is to adapt or die. Since death of an organization means serious economic disruption to all concerned, adapting to leaner and flexible processes is the only viable choice. These types of changes are always talked about in an organization but ultimately there is little motivation to go through painful change when everyone feels like the ship is generally going in the right direction.

While SaaS and cloud computing are not a panacea, it does offer organizations the ability to get in, get up and get running more quickly and cost-effectively than traditional software applications. While the TCO debate continues over whether saas is cheaper with larger user populations over a long period of time, there is one major component that is overlooked when calculating the benefits of saas. Continuous upgrading of a SaaS platform means a company never has to go through an upgrade or deal with the incompatibilities so-called suite product offerings.

The reality of SAP and Oracle’s products is they are a mixture of legacy code bases from the companies they purchased over the years. So adding a configurator to your CRM system means a whole new implementation with business disruption and resource drain to do the implementation. Further, if the configurator gets an upgrade there is no guarantee that it will work with your existing versions of opportunity management and demand planning. This is why so many companies are running customer support systems that are 2 years past the last upgrade and in numerous cases outside standard support from the vendor. It’s also why SOA has become a mantra in many IT circles.

The Time to Move On

Today everything must be reevaluated with more and more organizations looking at their legacy systems and transitioning them to the cloud. They will be able to do it more quickly with less money and maintain the applications with fewer people. In addition they will be able to react more quickly to changing market requirements and even globalize operations to take advantage of lower labor costs or access to new market opportunities. It is time to realize that building a SAS 70 II compliant data center is better left to those who do that sort of thing for a living. Likewise, it is time to acknowledge that the lower levels of the software stack have commoditized to a point where there should be little or no need for a staff of database architects and programmers, no matter where their located, hammering endlessly at an attempt to hone the perfect application to keep the business running. Situational, composite applications that adhere to enterprise conditions and dynamics and are turned around in days rather than months are the new new things.

2009 will be a watershed year for SaaS because the cost of maintaining the status quo is no longer sustainable in the face of seismic economic changes. The organizations that will survive, or even thrive, going forward are the ones whose systems don’t prevent them from making the necessary changes to their business model or operating practices. All the talk of building an agile enterprise will be put to the test this year and cloud offerings will be one of the key enabling technologies that will increase the likelihood of success.

There is life after traditional legacy applications in the enterprise and it’s time for both you and SaaS to go forward together into this new life.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, crossing the chasm, database, geoffrey moore, IT department, IT projects, IT silos, legacy applications, saas, Sales and CRM, soa, software-as-a-service

Below is the complete article:

The Long Tail of IT
Pankaj Malviya, June 25, 2008

Everyone who has worked in — or even with — an IT department knows that the demand for projects always exceeds IT’s ability to deliver them all. IT is able to address only those most highly prioritized, core business projects that receive the budget, staff and priority to develop, test, deliver and maintain over time. If projects don’t make the “A” list, the project either doesn’t get done or workers have to find a way to do it themselves.

Today’s more tech-savvy, Web 2.0 workforce has increasingly resorted to getting the tools it needs from SaaS software providers. In an ideal world, IT must be an active partner in prescribing technology to help the rest of the business work better together, move information efficiently, and get the answers needed to make the next strategic or tactical decisions. This is what the Long Tail of IT is all about: really important IT automation projects that would help the business but that consistently don’t make the list of must-do projects.

The platform-as-a-service evolution that is starting to emerge (for example, with solutions from Amazon, Google and LongJump) is one that has potential to restore the luster of the IT department, because these solutions are focused on delivering “customized, situational applications” that connect to a range of common and uncommon processes.

Platform-as-a-service provides a turnkey environment to build applications that teams can use to share data and collaborate. There is no infrastructure to install, and the time and cost to build, deploy and customize new applications is greatly reduced.

PaaS solutions should also be able to integrate with other sources of data using simple web-services APIs. Connecting to enterprise data sources securely is fundamental. Additionally, customization is extremely important; applications that are created must meet the unique requirements of businesses. PaaS should provide a visual way to create new forms, model and automate processes and workflows, and implement actionable data policies.

Rather than needing to work with a one-size-fits-all application (and an extensive, dedicated IT architecture), PaaS platforms need to be able to draw from functional domain experts from Marketing to Sales to HR to easily customize applications, or quickly create and publish situational applications, that are better suited to their unique business requirements. The PaaS platforms also need to deliver enterprise-level service, security, and hardware and software architecture, as well as rich functionality for each application, ranging from configurable dashboard widgets to a flexible database architecture that enables extensive relationships between application data, search capabilities across all applications, etc.

PaaS’ rise is built upon need. The fact that PaaS is on demand and in the cloud is driven by the reality that IT isn’t able to support its multi-departmental constituents with a flexible business platform of information and collaboration. Information workers don’t have time to build a server, manage a database, design a UI, etc. PaaS offers a convenient, predictable, leverageable alternative to yesterday’s big IT initiatives.

That doesn’t mean IT is off the hook, however. In fact, PaaS needs IT to succeed. Not just to bless the technology around security and scalability issues, but to be the guiding light of information management:

• How do you organize your data permissions?
• What data needs to connect to other data to form applications?
• Do the new applications meet required compliance standards for users’ data protection? What should that data and application look like?
• How much is customer-facing, and how much is back-end?
• What external systems need to connect to this data?

PaaS gives IT something it never had: the ability to manage the ‘I’ without the need for too much ‘T.’ No hardware to install; no database to optimize; no web servers to update. PaaS provides structured, centralized data and processes that are enterprise-agnostic. The focus is then realigned on the applications one can build and the business problems one can solve, not on the technology that built them.

Pankaj Malviya is the Founder & CEO of LongJump.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, GigaOm, IT department, on-demand, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas

It’s very clear that the infrustructure of web products and components is starting to consolidate into ready-to-go solutions from hosting, applications, and (like LongJump) complete enterprise application development plaforms.

According to Om Malik:

The platforms on which we have done business for over a decade are starting to provide diminishing returns; the smart money, meanwhile, is seeking new platform structures.

We completely agree with Om’s assessment. The time is certainly right for Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solutions like LongJump. With functionality on the web ever improving, the need to drive down operational costs always looming, the agility of a business a paramount importance, it’s only a matter of time for enterprises large and small to move some key areas of their business on the grid.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, GigaOm, IT department, on-demand, PaaS, Platform-as-a-Service, saas